On Sat, 24 May 2008, Alexandre Julliard wrote: [...]
Actually I was thinking of simply no longer maintaining a Changelog file. It made sense in the days of CVS to store changeset information, but now with git the same information and more can be retrieved trivially with git-log, and the linear log format won't work so well once we start having multiple branches.
Objections? Does anybody feel a strong need for a Changelog file?
Users who get Wine as a precompiled package, maybe through their distribution, won't be able to easily run git-log or git-whatchanged. I know I often check the changelog in /usr/share/doc/<packagename> when I have trouble with a Debian package. So I think a changelog should still be included in the Wine packages.
It does not have to, and probably shouldn't, list all changes made in the past 15 years though. I'll leave determining the best cutoff date to others. Also this could potentially be handled by the Wine packager rather than being part of the Wine sources. Finally, the individual commit messages may not be the easiest thing to understand for non-developpers either. I think this is more true of Wine than of other packages. That could argue for a changelog that's not just a collection of the commit messages. Maybe something culled from the ANNOUNCE messages, though these tend to be too terse, imho. Of course the trouble is that this would require quite a bit of work.
Anyway, these were just my 2 EuroCents.